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Cyclomatic
May 29, 2012

"I'm past caring about what might be lost by letting alphabet soups monitor every last piece of communication between every human being on the planet."

I unironically love Big Brother.

Project1 posted:

I'd be interested to hear what people have done with players starting out as slaves. I'm particularly interested in what the characters were doing as slaves, and why risking death in the wastes was more appealing than living as a slave.

Gladiator slaves is an obvious one, but I find that one a little overdone. Some other type of slavery would be nice, and I'd like to hear, for example, how a frail Preserver slave knows a tough Gladiator slave well enough to plot escape together.

The classic Darksun version of "you all meet in a tavern" is "you are all slaves on a caravan being sent to be worked to death on Kalak's Ziggarut". Replace Kalak's Ziggarut with obsidian gathering, iron mines, gladiator pits, etc. Not all slaves get worked to death, but there are a lot of jobs where they do work slaves to death.

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ritorix
Jul 22, 2007

Vancian Roulette
There is also the "everyone is owned by the same noble" trope that the dark Sun novels used. Easy way to tie together gladiators, scribes, menial laborers, even a sympathetic templar with a heart of gold.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Sympathetic Templar with a heart of gold? What's this touchy feely bullshit doing in my Dark Sun? :v:

jigokuman
Aug 28, 2002


Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality.

PeterWeller posted:

Sympathetic Templar with a heart of gold? What's this touchy feely bullshit doing in my Dark Sun? :v:
Impact! If everything is brutal devastation all the time, you become desensitized. The templar with a heart of gold gives you hope for redemption before his heart is pulled out by his master for betraying him. You have to build things up a bit before you tear them down.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

jigokuman posted:

Impact! If everything is brutal devastation all the time, you become desensitized. The templar with a heart of gold gives you hope for redemption before his heart is pulled out by his master for betraying him. You have to build things up a bit before you tear them down.

Ahh, good point. TSR actually did a pretty good job of this in the first series of adventures. In the third module, Arcane Shadows, the players help this dude become an avangion, and it's all set up so that he can be a major ally of theirs, complete with a hidden magic valley for them to lay low in. Then in the mega-adventure finale to the series, Dragon's Crown, he gets assassinated off-screen by his halfling buddy from the Order. That poo poo really pissed off one of my buddies when I ran it in middle school, and I can still picture him yelling about it.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

PeterWeller posted:

Ahh, good point. TSR actually did a pretty good job of this in the first series of adventures. In the third module, Arcane Shadows, the players help this dude become an avangion, and it's all set up so that he can be a major ally of theirs, complete with a hidden magic valley for them to lay low in. Then in the mega-adventure finale to the series, Dragon's Crown, he gets assassinated off-screen by his halfling buddy from the Order. That poo poo really pissed off one of my buddies when I ran it in middle school, and I can still picture him yelling about it.
Hilariously, I'm running a 4e conversion of this adventure right now. I honestly think it's mostly poorly-written and railroady, but I like the plot potential Korgunard represents and if I could rehab Forest Maker, I can rehab and up-level this. But um... well, the party has just been ambushed by the Black Sand Raiders, and it turns out that a Level+3 encounter containing 5 Skirmishers and 4 Artillery is basically the antidote to all their tactics. The Warlord is out of his impressive healing repetoire, their two big Strikers are down and at 2 failed death saves each, the psion's out of power points, and only the Thri-Kreen Berserker is still up and in good shape (because Enter the Crucible is a hell of a drug). And one of the Raiders is threatening to stab Korgunard if they don't surrender. They focus-fired on the two leaders, who were kinda scary, but not much more than their crew this time around.

Mazed
Oct 23, 2010

:blizz:


Project1 posted:

I'd be interested to hear what people have done with players starting out as slaves. I'm particularly interested in what the characters were doing as slaves, and why risking death in the wastes was more appealing than living as a slave.

As of right now, the "you're a slave" premise is one that I'm planning on starting with, in the campaign I'm putting together.

The PCs can come from any background, but they will not know one another -- I'm not allowing it; they'll need to foster their relationships through play. They'll be on a silt-skimmer headed towards Cromlin. The skimmer passes by the ruins of Giustenal, and as the adventure opens, one of the slavers has heard the Caller in Darkness, lashed out at his colleagues in a fit of paranoia, and ultimately caused the death of all on board, save the PCs. They begin while stil in shackles, on a motionless skimmer, the crew all bloodily murdered, and the only thing in sight the ruined city in the distance.

I think that's a nice note to kick a Dark Sun game off on. :getin:

Dick Burglar
Mar 6, 2006
I had never heard of the Caller in Darkness before. That is... interesting. Giustenal is a really cool drat place in the setting, but it always seemed more of an end-game (or at least higher level) area. How will you make it accessible to low level characters? If they head into the city ruins, won't the Caller go bananas on them if anyone is psychic? Looking at its 2E stats, it looks pretty lethal, especially for lower level characters.

I'm not at all saying your idea is bad; it sounds really cool. I'm just not sure how it's meant to work out for new characters.

Dick Burglar fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Nov 30, 2012

Mazed
Oct 23, 2010

:blizz:


I'm not sure of the mechanics -- hell, not sure which system I want to use for it either. :v: 4e and 3e/Pathfinder are on the table, but Chaosium's Basic Roleplay has also been suggested.

As for the Caller, I want it to be a danger, but something that presents an equal challenge to low as well as high-level characters -- maybe playing it as a sort of "sanity" mechanic. A big theme that I want to have for that adventure is how much the PCs can trust each other, how they handle the threat of psychic manipulation from the Caller (and the possibility of NPCs they become acquainted with falling victim), and what measures they take to try and deal with it. They'll come across different ways to do this, for sure, but figuring out which is best to use, and when, is the incentive. Like, do they want to use something that nullifies all psionics including their own, do they want to conduct a ritual that repels the Caller but involves defiling magic, etc.

As for Giustenal itself, I have the City by the Silt Sea box, and the setting as presented there is easily adjusted for all levels. It's big, too -- not just the ruined city itself, but also the desert environs, and several deeper sections of varying themes -- a part of the city that's sunken beneath the silt (which they can find the means to traverse), an undead-inhabited town that'd once been a refuge for demihumans, magma-filled caverns that have been settled by Dregoth's rejected experiments, a network of psionic relay tunnels, Dregoth's 'New Giustenal' subterranean city, and even an extraplanar bit.

I'm embellishing it with additional details to make it all more interconnected, like having vent-shafts from the magma caverns leading all the way up to the volcanic hills outside the city, placing the undead town amongst stalactites in an enormous cavern high above a saltwater lake which, far far beneath, houses New Giustenal in a dome of air (giving Dregoth's new city a very otherworldly feel), that sort of stuff.

GimpInBlack
Sep 27, 2012

That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.

Dick Burglar posted:

I had never heard of the Caller in Darkness before. That is... interesting. Giustenal is a really cool drat place in the setting, but it always seemed more of an end-game (or at least higher level) area. How will you make it accessible to low level characters? If they head into the city ruins, won't the Caller go bananas on them if anyone is psychic? Looking at its 2E stats, it looks pretty lethal, especially for lower level characters.

I'm not at all saying your idea is bad; it sounds really cool. I'm just not sure how it's meant to work out for new characters.

There can be plenty of low-level critters, people driven insane by the Caller, weird magic effects, etc. lurking around the ruins, and while the default 4E skill challenge system isn't really all that fun, setting up the occasional "encounter" with the Caller as an "oh, poo poo, run away!" scene could be pretty cool if you used one of the homebrew skill challenge systems out there that aren't terrible.

Project1
Dec 30, 2003

it's time

ritorix posted:

There is also the "everyone is owned by the same noble" trope that the dark Sun novels used. Easy way to tie together gladiators, scribes, menial laborers, even a sympathetic templar with a heart of gold.

Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Maybe the previous master was strict but fair, only beating them when they gently caress up and feeding them enough to stay healthy. Only he's just died, perhaps even because one or more of the slaves accidentally killed him. Now the estate's inheritor isn't as kind to his slaves, and they realise that they'll end up dying of exhaustion or flogging if they stick around.

Speaking of scribes, I read in one place that the only (legally) literate slaves are of some Sorcerer-King, who is making them translate some evil text that drives them mad. But I read elsewhere that some nobles have scribes, who get sent to the fighting pits if they upset their masters. I'll probably go for the latter, but which is "canon"?

EDIT: I'm thinking Raam would be an interesting place to start. Parts of the city where even the templars are too scared to enter, so slaves don't necessarily have to flee into the wastes.

Project1 fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Dec 2, 2012

Mazed
Oct 23, 2010

:blizz:


Project1 posted:

EDIT: I'm thinking Raam would be an interesting place to start. Parts of the city where even the templars are too scared to enter, so slaves don't necessarily have to flee into the wastes.

This is a good idea. If the whole place is already a mess, the slaves already don't run as big as risk of standing out -- at the very least, any stir they cause will just blend in with the rest of the chaos. On the flipside, they have every opportunity to stumble into situations that can go from zero to terrifying in the blink of an eye. Which is great, because adventure.


You should make a 1-99 chart of "Raam-streetside mayhem events" to roll on if it ever starts to get slow. Everything from an innocuous pickpocketing to a crazed Defiler suddenly deciding not to give a gently caress anymore.

Mazed fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Dec 2, 2012

Lima
Jun 17, 2012

Project1 posted:

Speaking of scribes, I read in one place that the only (legally) literate slaves are of some Sorcerer-King, who is making them translate some evil text that drives them mad. But I read elsewhere that some nobles have scribes, who get sent to the fighting pits if they upset their masters. I'll probably go for the latter, but which is "canon"?

Both nobles and SKs have literate slaves. I think it's the Nibenay section in Ivory Triangle that describes it, but the nobles' tutor their children and keep the family library neat.

Lima fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Dec 2, 2012

Liesmith
Jan 29, 2006

by Y Kant Ozma Post

Comstar posted:

So my Dark Sun 2nd Ed game starts this week, and I've spent hours with the players just making characters. And re-learnt all the wonderful things of 2nd Ed- For that roll you roll high, but this one you want low, and you need to add to that dice but then subtract from that dice, and no it makes no sense.

My biggest concern right now is how to do EXP. It's all so much to track. I suppose most people do it at the end of the session?

There's a lot of computer aids and programs out there, but I'm playing a rule set from 20 years ago. I need a campaign tracker, something to keep track of NPC's and ideally something to help with combat. What is a good program(s) to use with 2nd Ed AD&D Dark Sun?

treat xp like you would in Dark Heresy, as a thing you give out for good play and your players track on their own. Impress upon them the need to track their own XP. every so often, check their totals to make sure that one guy hasn't got 100k more than the next dude. Fortunately, high level 2e D&D takes so much xp that you really shouldnt have a problem with one guy being a few thousand ahead of the next guy.

Project1
Dec 30, 2003

it's time
How well does a Sorcerer-King know what's going on with it's templars, with regards to granted spells? I know a templar can have their spells cut off, but is this something a S-K has to do consciously?

I'll give a couple of examples to show what I'm getting at: One templar is acting loyal, but in secret, is using his templar spells to work directly against the S-K. Will he lose his spells only if found out, or will the S-K somehow know he is disloyal? Another templar is missing, presumed dead, but she is merely trapped somewhere. Does the S-K know she is alive because she's drawing spells?

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


Project1 posted:

Speaking of scribes, I read in one place that the only (legally) literate slaves are of some Sorcerer-King, who is making them translate some evil text that drives them mad. But I read elsewhere that some nobles have scribes, who get sent to the fighting pits if they upset their masters. I'll probably go for the latter, but which is "canon"?

"Canon" is that literacy is outlawed among basically everyone who isn't an SK or one of their slavishly faithful servants (templars/nobles/slaves/etc.). In reality, all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds are literate, but if you don't want to wind up mining obsidian until you die, you keep your literacy a secret when you're in one of the big towns. It's your game, literacy can be integral to the plot, or it can come up rarely and only if the players think to ask.

Project1 posted:

How well does a Sorcerer-King know what's going on with it's templars, with regards to granted spells? I know a templar can have their spells cut off, but is this something a S-K has to do consciously?

I'll give a couple of examples to show what I'm getting at: One templar is acting loyal, but in secret, is using his templar spells to work directly against the S-K. Will he lose his spells only if found out, or will the S-K somehow know he is disloyal? Another templar is missing, presumed dead, but she is merely trapped somewhere. Does the S-K know she is alive because she's drawing spells?

Again it's your game so it works however you want it to, and you can even decide that different SK's have different abilities to sense what their templars are up to. Even in the "canon" relationship, SK's are basically deus ex machinas that do whatever the writer/adventure designer needs them to be able to do to move the plot forward. SK's are also unfathomably ancient and powerful compared to anyone living in their realms, and they didn't get to the position they're in now by missing the forest for the trees - SK's might know that one of their followers is doing something contrary to their will, but in the long run the templar's actions might inadvertently benefit the SK's greater plans anyway, so they don't intervene in the templar's dealings unless something super egregious starts to happen.

But seriously, it's your game, decide how you want things to work and feel free to change it if it suits the story or makes an adventure more exciting.

ritorix
Jul 22, 2007

Vancian Roulette
Yeah basically the SKs do exactly what they need to do to drive the story.

Back in the day they were literally maxed-out wizards and psions at the same time, which gives exactly the sort of godlike power that it sounds like it would. SKs freely shapeshifted, teleported, mind-scanned and otherwise hosed around with mortals, most of which never even find out they were dealing with a dragon. Their immortal perspective on life was so far beyond mortals that their plans could span generations and make no sense at all.

From the fiction they heard calls for spells just like gods heard prayers, and could then use their array of powers to look into the situation. Or they might get annoyed and deny the spell. But they probably just tuned it out along with dozens of others begging for help at the same time.

I'm going back to 2e for these examples; in 4e you just got 'imbued' with divine power once and got to use it forever after, so either approach is available to suit your game. Technically 4e didn't allow the divine power source in dark sun, but it was often added back in as a SK-granted thing like 2e did. The imbuing thing allowed for a lot of 'ex-templar but still has spells' concepts.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

Project1 posted:

How well does a Sorcerer-King know what's going on with it's templars, with regards to granted spells? I know a templar can have their spells cut off, but is this something a S-K has to do consciously?
As the others said, it's basically "whatever drives the plot, mang."

I mean, on the one side, you have Tithian conspiring to kill Kalak. On the other hand you have the (excellent) Rise and Fall of a Dragon King, which portrays Hamanu as basically a god within his own city, complete with avatars. Really, pick a way that works - and don't feel compelled to stick to it, even for the same sorcerer-king.

Mazed
Oct 23, 2010

:blizz:


On PCs (templars or otherwise) going against the Sorcerer-Kings: Mythology has its fair share of stories about mortals who challenge the gods. It rarely goes very well for them, but it still makes for a great story. An adventure, particularly for Dark Sun, should be all about the protagonists getting into truly awful situations and earning their heroism by facing and enduring it.

GimpInBlack
Sep 27, 2012

That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.
If anybody's interested, over in the Dungeon World thread I'm working on a Dark Sun hack for DW.

Dr_Gee
Apr 26, 2008
So I've got a question about racial dynamics in Dark Sun.

The game I'm getting ready to start playing in is going to be premised on, "You're leading a caravan to an unDefiled valley that's been blocked off from the rest of the world! You are the Caravan Master and rest of the party is the Bridge Crew. Go."

The problem is coming in that the DM is playing the tribalistic nature of the setting extremely tightly, to the extent that any non-Human races will likely be reviled and treated with untold suspicion and outright hatred, with a side order of probably not being able to interact much with the refugees we're leading. A lot of this his own dislike for the more sparkly races like Elves or Dragonborn in general, but he's mentioned that in the 2E Dark Sun materials this was pretty much how it went and none of the races worked together aside from trying to enslave or raid the others.

While I haven't read the 2E stuff myself, I've read through most of the early parts of this thread and this interpretation seems a bit...extreme. Part of the fun of D&D has always been that it's a chance to escape from the fact that the real world is extremely tribalistic and racist as gently caress, but the 2E stuff is being used as a reason to maintain as realistic a setting as possible in this regard.

One of the other players has already been strongly discouraged from playing an Elf since they probably couldn't enter any cities or villages without being killed, and I've gotten the same thing for proposing both a Dray and an Earthsoul Gensai. Was the setting really written up this harshly in 2e? It's gotten to the point where I'm regretting having suggested Dark Sun as a setting, which loving sucks since I've been wanting to play in this setting for years since first stumbling into this thread.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

That's not how 2E presented the setting. There are a lot of single-race communities, and elves are generally mistrusted; but the cities, many villages, and all slave tribes are multi-racial, and any decent sized settlement is going to have an elven market.

Project1
Dec 30, 2003

it's time
No, not really. The races definitely don't like each other much, but in some cases they have to work together, so they've got to get over that. In other cases, say an elven caravan rolls into town. The humans figure they're going to be scammed out of everything they own, but they still really need something the elves have, so they put up with it. Occasionally, friendships form across racial lines. Basically, they hate (or at least distrust) each other, but have to put up with each other anyway, so tolerance does happen.

The only really hard thing to get over is thri-kreen and elves, since the thri-kreen wants to eat the elf.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Halflings are kinda hard to mix in as well, since the halfling wants to eat everyone.

Project1
Dec 30, 2003

it's time
That's true.

Anyway, Dr_Gee, sounds like you have one of those wonderful DMs who punishes players for not building exactly the sort of character he wants you to. If he doesn't have any other redeeming qualities, you should really consider dropping him.

Dick Burglar
Mar 6, 2006
Or at least tell him he's seriously misrepresenting the old material, and that he should ease up. Who knows, maybe he's one of those mythical DMs that chills out when people tell him he's acting like a dickhead.

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Depending on the circumstances, a Thri-Kreen could form a clutch with members outside of its own race. Mul and humans interact in almost every city state. Elves are mistrusted, halflings (I think, anyway) are misunderstood. I guess the races that get dicked the most are Muls (slaves) or Elves (thieves). Still, nothing stuck out as any group or peoples being outright racist. Does your GM just want everyone to play humans?

Dr_Gee
Apr 26, 2008
I had already emailed him along the lines of, "Look, this seems a bit much and is starting to get un-fun. I can't even imagine this working given the level of anti-human-ness you're implying." It's good to get some reassurance that, no, the setting isn't that insane.

I think a lot of this comes from his homebrew setting of the last 30 years which I also play in and is fun, but I'm hoping for this game to be more along the lines of, "That's the Wasteland for you!" than intensely realistic consequences of farting the wrong way in the desert. I said that if he doesn't feel he can run the setting more loosely I'd step in and run it. Only reason I didn't in the first place is I haven't DM'd before and would be pretty unsure of putting encounters and the campaign as a whole together.

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Are you doing it in 4e? It's pretty easy to set up. Just sprinkle in skill challenges, combat encounters, and narrative. I've found it's best to always have at least two of those per session. The DMG has a section on designing encounters. You can always ask for help in the DM help thread.

Dr_Gee
Apr 26, 2008
Ya, 4E. And the DM stepped out, basically saying that what I think the of the setting is totally incompatible with the way he thinks. I'm going to take over which should be interesting! I'm sending the players a Wall of Text with my thoughts on the setting and character stuff, but I sent a shorter email using some of the better Dark Sun pictures I've seen to set the mood.

Excited!

Dick Burglar
Mar 6, 2006
What a fuckhead. Good riddance.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Dr_Gee posted:

Ya, 4E. And the DM stepped out, basically saying that what I think the of the setting is totally incompatible with the way he thinks. I'm going to take over which should be interesting! I'm sending the players a Wall of Text with my thoughts on the setting and character stuff, but I sent a shorter email using some of the better Dark Sun pictures I've seen to set the mood.

Excited!

Yo. Any feedback on your 1st DarkSun DM session?

GlazedMcGuffin
Jan 26, 2004
I'm considering changing the weapon breakage rule for my game, and was hoping to get some feedback. Changing it to:

If the player critfails, the enemy gets an opportunity attack. They can try to avoid this by re-rolling, but on a hit their weapon breaks.

I'm flavoring it as a 1 means they left an opening for their opponent to exploit, but they can try to keep them at bay with a wild attack. It sets up a strange paradox where on a re-roll a careful players is hoping to miss, but I can deal with that. Thoughts?

Brother Entropy
Dec 27, 2009

Well, the most obvious question to me is what do you do if there's not an adjacent enemy? If my ranged weapon character rolls a 1 and the enemy I was aiming for doesn't have a ranged attack that can reach me do I just get to avoid that whole question of which option to choose? If yes, it's kinda unfair to the melee guys. If no, then it'll probably complicate things more with letting them approach you for free.

I do like the idea of leaving an opening for an enemy to exploit but I think it could be written better or not having it be connected to the weapon breakage rule.

PeterWeller
Apr 21, 2003

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

GlazedMcGuffin posted:

I'm considering changing the weapon breakage rule for my game, and was hoping to get some feedback. Changing it to:

If the player critfails, the enemy gets an opportunity attack. They can try to avoid this by re-rolling, but on a hit their weapon breaks.

I'm flavoring it as a 1 means they left an opening for their opponent to exploit, but they can try to keep them at bay with a wild attack. It sets up a strange paradox where on a re-roll a careful players is hoping to miss, but I can deal with that. Thoughts?

The rule I used for weapon breakage was that on a 1 they had to make a saving throw or their weapon broke. Higher quality materials added a bonus, and the few magic weapons they scored were immune to breakage. I found this encouraged looting extra weapons and made metal and magic weapons especially valuable in a campaign using inherent bonuses.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


GlazedMcGuffin posted:

I'm considering changing the weapon breakage rule for my game, and was hoping to get some feedback. Changing it to:

If the player critfails, the enemy gets an opportunity attack. They can try to avoid this by re-rolling, but on a hit their weapon breaks.

I'm flavoring it as a 1 means they left an opening for their opponent to exploit, but they can try to keep them at bay with a wild attack. It sets up a strange paradox where on a re-roll a careful players is hoping to miss, but I can deal with that. Thoughts?

It still kind of sucks that they have a flat 5% of giving an enemy a free attack, especially considering that this disproportionately disadvantages melee characters over other builds (as Brother Entropy mentioned). It also mucks with the action economy of 4E which is a pretty serious issue, especially if the characters play past the heroic tier in an ongoing campaign.

I'd probably make it something that the players can only opt into for dramatic flair, and not something that happens every time a die rolls a one. Maybe something like "if you roll a natural 1, you can either calculate the result as normal, or treat it as if it were an natural 20 (confirming crits and w/e else) but the trade is your weapon/implement/device breaks". Even that's not a perfect fit because of the way that every character is pretty dependent on their weapon/implement for the majority of their combat utility in 4E and then you have to keep track of what their attack bonus and damage riders turn into if they're using a non-ideal weapon or no weapon or whatever.

It's the kind of rule that worked better in 2E when pretty much every melee weapon was as good as any other (aside from flavor and a point or two of damage) but I don't know how well it's ever going to translate into 4E. I guess if you're using the innate bonus advancement option presented in the DS players guide then it's less of an issue, but 4E characters are so much more gear dependent as they level that I don't see it working long term.

GlazedMcGuffin
Jan 26, 2004
I guess I'm slightly perplexed by the idea of awarding someone a critical success when they roll a 1, which is something I've considered but can't quite justify. On the other hand, it gives a simple "something bad happens, but there's a silver lining," which I like. Another idea is the "your weapon cracks. X cracks and it will break", but honestly that just sounds tedious.

All cards on the table, this is a 13th Sun game, which would mean that I could do opportunity attacks for ranged characters also (or an equivalent dowwnside), and has an "action economy" that is somewhat less fragile than 4E. I've also made it clear to everyone that this is going to be a high mortality game, and I intend to keep weapons plentiful but common. Magic items will be the most rare treasures, carrying an appropriate level of danger with them.

Now, all this said, the last thing I want is for the game to be plain unfun, so I ideally want weapon breakage to be something the characters enjoy story-wise when it happens, but with a bittersweet benefit and not cataclysmic.

Dr_Gee
Apr 26, 2008

tuluk posted:

Yo. Any feedback on your 1st DarkSun DM session?

The first session went OkayTM and was just me getting them started out of Balic. The players are the pseudo-Elite squad of the trading house Boss in the city. Years back this guy had discovered a secret Eden type place and was planning to send them out, independently of the trading house, to form a caravan in Tyr that would Go Forth And Settle New Lands. The caveat is that the party was going to get set-up for the murder of The Boss as an unknown, but extremely powerful and influential, Defiler had learned enough about the plans to want to steal the information and find the place to grab all the power.

So the game started with the players being summoned to The Boss' office where he gave them his old diary and the two ritual scrolls needed to open up the gateway to the New Eden. After the game the guy who was planning on DM'ing said he was going to have The Boss get mysteriously poisoned and have the party shunted out via diplomatic fallout.

I had his head explode mid-sentence in a gout of Defiling magic. The previous DM said he actually liked my method better; nothing like exploding heads to light the fire of haste beneath the collective asses of an adventuring group. I also wanted to get across the idea that my version of Dark Sun contains a pretty thick layer of silly B-movie bullshit, which I think went through.

Right before the head explosion the players made a ridiculous Perception check and noticed the battalion of Templars and guards marching in towards the trading house. Obviously, they had been set up to take the fall and needed to GTFO of the city. I had only sketched out a basic chase scene since I had gotten back from a grad-school interview on the other side of the country a day before. They had to run through the city to an exit to the sewers as an alarm was sent out that there was at least one major defiler on the loose and the entire city was starting to go into a panic.

The party continued to make obscene skill rolls and stayed way ahead of the guards, which was probably for the best as I was pulling most of this out of my rear end. They had enough time to grab a few quick supplies before escaping through the sewer and got out of the city walls with even more time to scavenge enough supplies to fill out their packs for the march to the next town.

It was a bit of a mash-up as I was dead tired towards the end, but everyone had enough fun to come back.

The next three sessions were a blatant 4E mechanics tutorial and started out a bit rough; I ran through the Sand Raiders adventure in the back of the campaign guide. People were a bit frustrated and it went slow for the first session and a half, but as we all got more comfortable with the rules the pace picked up quite a bit. I had to tone back the damage of the three encounters to prevent a TPK, but the group is getting a lot more cohesive.

This is getting pretty long, but if there's interest I can write up what's been happening story-wise and what I have planned out so for. The TL;DR version is that the party needs to work for either an Elven trading family, the Veiled Alliance, or the Templars in Tyr to get the resources together to start the caravan. They chose the elves initially so I folded that into the Bloodsand Arena.

Freaking Crumbum
Apr 17, 2003

Too fuck to drunk


GlazedMcGuffin posted:

I guess I'm slightly perplexed by the idea of awarding someone a critical success when they roll a 1, which is something I've considered but can't quite justify . . . the last thing I want is for the game to be plain unfun

The second part kind of explains the first part. Weapon breaking is definitely a staple from the original incarnation of DS but to be honest I don't think it was a particularly exciting rule. I mean it might make things unintentionally exciting when a dude loses his weapon at a very inconvenient time, but in general it's not a rule I would want to play with because the novelty of the inconvenience isn't very much fun after the first time. I also don't think it's very good design to have mechanics in place that can drastically change the outcome of an encounter when said mechanics occur at random and there's little the players can do to avoid them (play a wizard like a real man I know, I know).

I don't even know if what I proposed would really work all that well either but I was more trying to give an example that allows the players to take ownership of whether or not their weapon breaks and make something useful out of it. As the DM, I can arbitrarily decide that their weapons break or their armor is rusted or any other thing via fiat, so it's not interesting to me for the melee players to have a 5% chance of straight losing their weapon every time they roll the dice.

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GlazedMcGuffin
Jan 26, 2004
Yeah, I see what you're saying. I really want to retain the weapon breakage because :black101:flavor, but I think you're probably right about it being unreliable and annoying after the novelty wears off. Thanks for sticking with me; this is my first Dark Sun campaign so I appreciate the perspective.

Maybe I'll just give the players the option of doubling their damage on a hit but it breaks their weapon, so that when it works with only minor inconvenience or adds cinematic flavor they can take advantage of the moment.

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